Date:  Wed, 16 Mar 1994 20:50:53 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike <RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET>

Subject: Re: A New Genitive Relative Pronoun?



Pardon my obtuseness, but being too lazy (Spring fever) to check on the

references in Am.Speech, I'm not quite clear: Do you mean you find people

writing/saying "The dog chased the man in which the cat bit"? That would

certainly have to have an asterisk in front of it for me. I don't even

think I could make sense of it.

    It is, of course, an interesting question whether <that> is strictly

a COMP, as Chomskyan analysis demonstrates quite nicely, or whether we are

to believe the wrong-headed intuition of most traditional and structuralist

grammarians who interpret it as a relative pronoun. We know, of course, that

that is how language changes: people come to reinterpret things in particular

contexts in different ways, and they thereby become different things. Thus

thinking makes it so. A form like "thats" looks like pretty good evidence.

[NB: that doesn't make me happy with Quirk et al.'s interpreting gerunds as

participles, however].

--Rudy Troike (rtroike[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ccit.arizona.edu)